194
PARTISAN REVIEW
Once cn1:lcs wrote as best they could, like anybody else-they
knew no better; but today many of them have a language and style
as institutionalized as those of sociologists. They have managed to
develop this style in fifteen or twenty years-one finds only its crude
beginnings in the
Hound and Horn
and the
Dial;
the critics of those
days may have sounded superior and difficult to the readers of those
days, but to us, now, they seem endearingly amateurish and human
and informal, so that one looks at some essay and thinks, smiling,
"That was certainly the
Paul et Virgi7l.ie
stage of Kenneth Burke."
Who had perfected, then, that strange sort of Law French which the
critic now can set up like a Chinese Wall between himself and the
lay (i. e., boreable) reader? The first generation wrote distinguishably
well; the second writes indistinguishably
ill;
who knows how the third
will write? Academic or scholarly writing has some bad qualities, and
the writing of Superior Intellectuals has others: the style that I am
describing almost combines the two. It is a style, a tone, that is hard
to
picture: if the two bears that ate the forty-two little children who
said to Elisha, "Go up, thou baldhead"-if they, after getting their
Ph. D.'s from the University of Gottingen, had retired to Atta Troll's
Castle and written a book called
A Prolegomena to Every Future Criti–
cism
'Of
Finnegans Wake
J
they might have written so.
This style partly is a result of the difficult or once-difficult position
of such critics (and of such intellectuals in general) in both our uni–
versities and our general literary culture. Sociologists went in for
jargon, psychologists for graphs and statistics
J
mostly because they
knew that physicists and chemists and biologists did not think sociology
and psychology sciences; English professors did the same thing for the
same reason; and the critics in the universities probably felt a similac
need to show the scholars who looked down on them that criticism
is just as difficult and just as much of a science as "English." But
the literary quarterlies are also "little magazines," revolutionary organs
of an oppressed or neglected class; their contributors, by using a
style which insists upon their superiority to the society that disregards
them, both protect themselves and punish their society.
One can understand why so many critics find it necessary to
worry and weary their readers to death, in the most impressive way
possible; if they themselves understood, they might no longer find
it necessary. Or so one thinks-but one is naive to think it: this
style or tone of theirs is a spiritual necessity, and how can they give
it up without finding something to put in its place? What began in
need has been kept and elaborated in love. And I don't want them
